Creative Beginnings: Visual Arts

Residency Overview: The Creative Beginnings wood sculpture residency introduces young children to the art form of sculpture. Students experience and create an art form in three-dimensional space while they simultaneously learn about wood, trees, and nature. Students learn language and vocabulary specific to sculpture. Students and teachers create an object of art that is unique and profound for the individual.

Arts Objectives Include:

  • Learn general sculpture language like mass, balance and space
  • Identify different ways to configure the same wood pieces
  • Express emotion and creativity

 Curriculum Connections:

  • Identify and practice math concepts such as pattern, placement, estimation and measurement
  • Learn and use new vocabulary words such as sculpture, sculptor, cantilever, abstract and void
  • Learn about trees and their cycles, and various uses for wood in our culture and others
  • Represent various ideas (object, place, etc.) through wood sculpture

 Sample Student Activities:

  • Play freely with wood pieces
  • Use the same pieces of wood to make various different configurations
  • Create both temporary and permanent sculptures
  • Express ideas verbally about your sculpture and comment on others’ work
  • Compose stories or poems which are connected to sculptures

Sample Professional Development Activities:

  • Play freely with wood pieces
  • Practice asking open ended questions while working with students
  • Practice introducing new vocabulary to students
  • Invent new ways to use the wood pieces in your classroom
  • Create a link between wood sculpture and a theme in your classroom

Facilitator’s Notes:

Before starting any wood sculpture activity, teachers must clear space to build on table surfaces or the floor. A wood center might be added to the available centers in the classroom with sandpaper , wood pieces, some cardboard, and a few early childhood books. Some teachers use a sand or water table to store wood. In the gluing stage of the residency smocks and table covers will be needed. Students should be taught a simple rhyme to manage the glue spreading.